Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Leila Jabarin, born Helen Brashatsky, waited more than fifty years to tell her Muslim family a shocking secret - that she was born in Auschwitz concentration camp. AFP reports:

UMM EL-FAHM, Israel — For more than five decades, Leila Jabarin hid her secret from her Muslim children and grandchildren -- that she was a Jewish Holocaust survivor born in Auschwitz concentration camp.

Although her family knew she was a Jewish convert, none of them knew of her brutal past.

It was only in the past week that Jabarin, who was born Helen Brashatsky, finally sat down and told them the story of how she was born inside Auschwitz, the most notorious symbol of Nazi Germany's wartime campaign of genocide against Europe's Jews.

In an interview with AFP to mark Holocaust Memorial Day which begins at sundown on Wednesday, Jabarin, now 70, chuckles as she talks about what to call her.

Her Muslim name is Leila, but in this Arab town in northern Israel where she has lived for the past 52 years, most people call her Umm Raja, Arabic for "Raja's mother" after her first-born son.

Like most Jewish children, she also has a Hebrew name -- Leah -- but she just likes to be called Helen.

She was six when she came to live in Mandate Palestine with her parents, just months before the State of Israel was declared in May 1948.

They arrived in a ship carrying Jewish immigrants from the former Yugoslavia, which was forced to anchor off the coast of Haifa for a week due to a heavy British bombardment of the northern port city, she says.

Despite the war which broke out as soon as the British pulled out, it was a far cry from the savage reality the family had witnessed inside Auschwitz, says Jabarin who is dressed in a hijab and long robes, but whose pale skin and blue eyes belie her Eastern European parentage.

Her mother, who was from Hungary, and her father, who was of Russian descent, were living in Yugoslavia when they were sent to the Auschwitz with their two young sons in 1941.

"When they took them to Auschwitz, she was pregnant with me, and when she gave birth, the Christian doctor at Auschwitz hid me in bath towels," she says, explaining how the doctor hid the family for three years under the floor of his house inside the camp.

Her mother worked as a maid at the doctor's home, while her father was the gardener.

"They used to come back at night and sleep under the floor and my mother used to tell us how the Nazis were killing children, but that this doctor saved us," she says, recalling how her mother used to feed them on dry bread soaked in hot water with salt.

"I still remember the black and white striped pyjamas and remember terrible beatings in the camp. If I was healthy enough, I would have gone back to see it but I have already had four heart attacks.

"It is scary and very, very difficult to remember that place where so many people suffered," she admits, speaking in a mix of Hebrew and accented Arabic.

She also speaks Hungarian, a little Yiddish and some Russian.

The family were finally freed when the camp was liberated in 1945 and left for Mandate Palestine three years later.

10 comments:

Why would it make a difference to someone's worldview if Ms Jabarin/Miss Brashatsky were granted a miracle of secret baby survival at Auschwitz?

Here is where I tend to doubt basing a worldview on a recollection. Someone interviewed in this book opines that anything is possible among the miracles that saved individual Jews during the Shoah: Blake Eskin: A Life in Pieces: The Making and Unmaking of Binjamin Wilkomirski . But then the author, Blake Eskin reveals the harsh conditions that negate that possibility. The sentence in the interview, "the Christian doctor at Auschwitz hid me in bath towels" echos one of the sentences in BW's fabricated recollection, Fragments, of survival in hidden towels of Auschwitz for the first four years of his life.

Michelle, I agree with you that it shouldn't make a difference to someone's world view that this woman was born in Auschwitz. Her family knew she was a Jewish convert, why did she fail to tell them about Auschwitz?

It is an interesting thought that she could have made the whole story up.

Or maybe she didn't make it up . Why not just take it at face value . She's an elderly lady who simply wants to relate the full narrative of het life before it's too late . Sad that some people are just born cynics .

Follow by Email

Click picture for Facebook page

Introduction

In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)